SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VIII #24 (July 1981): 121-142.

Mark Rose

Filling the Void: Verne, Wells, and Lem

Concerned with the human in relation to the non-human, SF could only
emerge in the context of a culture that articulates crucial aspects of
its experience in those terms. Moreover, because it represents a secular
transformation of religious concerns, SF could only emerge in a context
in which the claims of traditional religion were still felt but in which
belief was at best problematic. A story such as H.G. Wells’s “The Star”
(1897), with its vision of the vast emptiness of interstellar space, is
dependent upon a sense of God’s withdrawal from the cosmos and upon a
radical sense of alienation, of unbridgeable difference between the human
and the non-human worlds. At one time, we know, this sense of alienation
from the natural world did not exist. Then the cosmos itself was a
sacrament, a manifestation of immanent deity linked to the human world by
love, by the great chain of the plenitude of the created universe, and by
the multitude of correspondences between the human and the natural
spheres, both participating in the magic of the divine logos. The
societies of Dante or of Ariosto or even of Kepler might have their
stories of passages through the weightless center of the Earth or of
journeys to an inhabited moon, but such stories could not be SF in the
same sense as Wells’s fable.

It is commonplace that the 17th century is the epoch in which man
discovers his isolation from the world of things, the period in which
human thought distinguishes itself from nature in order to examine it and
in this act disengages itself from the object of its study.1 In treating motion mathematically and thus draining
nature of such Aristotelian anthropomorphisms as “will” and “desire,”
Galileo founded modern science. But the shift from a sacramental to an
alienated sense of the cosmos did not come into being until long after
Galileo. The Copernican revolution in astronomy is often employed by
modern writers as the symbol of man’s displacement from the central
position in the world, but the Copernican universe was still very much a
sacramental one, and the revolution was not at first felt as a demotion
of human importance. For Copernicus himself the solar system was a temple
and the sun a magical sign of God:

In the middle of all sits the Sun on his throne. In this loveliest of
temples, could we place the luminary in any more appropriate place so
that he may light the whole simultaneously. Rightly is he called the Lamp
the Mind, the Ruler of the Universe: Hermes Trismegistus entitles him the
God Visible. Sophocles’ Electra names him the All-seeing. Thus does the
Sun sit as upon a royal dais ruling his children the planets which circle
about him.2

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Copernicus’s universe was of course finite. The 17th-century
comprehension of the infinite void of cosmic space resulted in a profound
philosophical disorientation. Pascal’s vertigo is perhaps the locus
classicus for the new sense of infinite immensity, but Pascal himself
is probably not to be simply identified with this terror of the void; and
we should remember, too, that the infinite universe as conceived by Newton
was still a cosmos charged with immanent deity, one in which gravity itself
might be understood as the moment by moment manifestation of God in the
world. “Does it not appear from Phaenomena,” Newton wrote in the Queries
appended to the Latin translation of his Opticks, “that there is a
Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite Space,
as it were in his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and
thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate
presence to himself.”3

The sense of alienation that informs SF is inseparable from the modern
scientific world view, but one cannot say simply that the rise of science
“caused” the sense of alienation. Indeed, in matters of cultural history
the very idea of causation may be misleading. Transformations of culture
occur, but not on the model of physical causation, and perhaps the best
that the cultural historian can do is to observe the kinds of
metamorphoses and reinterpretations of the world that have occurred. In
any case, the kind of alienation from the natural world that SF
presupposes really only comes into being in the 19th century and it is
intimately associated both with industrialization and urbanization and
with the Victorian crisis of faith, with the disappearance of God that
marks the beginning of the modern sense of radical disconnection. Seen
from this point of view, the Romantic poets’ struggle to preserve the
connection with nature can be understood as an expression of the moment
of separation. Later in the century, however, the melancholy, long,
withdrawing roar of the Sea of Faith left exposed the naked shingles of
the world, revealing a desert, or, worse, a monstrous battleground in
which individuals and species fought for survival in a world empty of
comfort or meaning. Looking at the universe in the absence of God, the
Victorians felt the Pascalian vertigo in a new key. What is human life?
“What is it all,” Tennyson asked, “but a trouble in the gleam of a
million million of suns?”4

The Victorian situation of urban man disconnected from God, cut off from
nature, separated from other men, is of course our own; it is in the 19th
century that the modern age of alienation begins. SF can be understood in
the context of 19th and 20th-century spiritual loneliness as a
manifestation of our culture’s longing to escape the prison-house of the
merely human. It might be considered as an attempt to reestablish, in
some way that will sustain conviction even in our technological and
post-Christian culture, the channels of communication with the non-human
world. Thus we get the many fables in which through the marvels of
science the marvels of the natural world are explored, and thus too the
many fables of contact with extraterrestrial beings. It does not matter
very much whether the non-human is portrayed as diabolic, as in “The
Star,” or as divine, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). What is
important is the attempt to replenish the void, to fill the immense
absence with meaning, even if this is accomplished by turning emptiness
itself into an antagonist that can be confronted in human terms.

1. Jules Verne’s subject is nature. The voyages
extraordinaires explore worlds known and unknown: the interior of
Africa, the interior of the Earth, the deeps of the sea, the deeps of
space. Characteristically, Verne’s voyagers travel in

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vehicles that are themselves closed worlds—his imagination projects
itself in terms of “inside” and “outside”—from which the immensity of
nature can be appreciated in upholstered comfort. The Nautilus is
the most familiar of these comfortable, mobile worlds; inside all is cozy
elegance, the epitome of the civilized and human, while outside the oceans
gleam or rage in inhuman beauty or mystery. Roland Barthes finds the
principle at the heart of Verne’s fictions to be the “ceaseless action of
secluding oneself.” The known and enclosed space, the comfortable cave, is
safe while “outside the storm, that is, the infinite, rages in vain.” The
basic activity in Verne is the construction of closed and safe spaces, the
enslavement and appropriation of nature to make a place for man to live in
comfort. “The enjoyment of being enclosed reaches its paroxysm when, from
the bosom of this unbroken inwardness, it is possible to watch, through a
large window-pane, the outside vagueness of the waters, and thus define, in
a single act, the inside by means of its opposite.”5

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) is just such an
exploration of “insideness,” except that here the interior world is the
non-human world, a realm of subterranean galleries, caverns, and seas,
and here rather than being the place of enclosed safety the interior
world becomes an immensity, a fearful abyss. Abysses dominate the novel.
Even before Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew, Axel, begin their
journey into the interior, Axel, the story’s narrator, has nightmares in
which he finds himself “hurtling into bottomless abysses with the
increasing velocity of bodies dropping through space.”6 The idea of the abyss is continually kept before
us, and always the danger is as much psychic as physical. Standing on the
edge of the first real chasm, Axel speaks of the “fascination of the
void” taking hold of him: “I felt my centre of gravity moving, and
vertigo rising to my head like intoxication. There is nothing more
overwhelming than this attraction of the abyss” (17:104). The danger,
evidently, is of losing one’s sense of self and of disappearing,
intoxicated, into the infinite void.

The abyss in this novel is a version of the cosmic void, but the geometry
of the earthly chasm differs from that of the astronomical infinity, for
the Earth is round and therefore has both poles and a center. Poles and
center are magical loci, the three still places on the turning globe.
When the Earth is conceived as a bounded world located in unbounded
space, the poles are extremities, the furthest points on the globe.
Indeed, imagined in this way, the poles are magical precisely because
they are the Earth’s boundaries and thus partake of the numinous power
associated with any boundary zone. They are the icy, uninhabitable
regions in which human space—the habitable world—meets the non-human
space of the infinite. To reach and explore the poles is to achieve the
completion of the human sphere by defining the Earth in its entirety.
(This is the meaning that seems to generate the 19th and early
20th-century obsession with polar exploration.) To reach the center of
the globe also means to achieve completion, except that now the Earth
itself has become the imagined immensity and the attainment of the center
means the penetration of the essence, the achievement of the heart of the
mystery. The liminal poles are frigid; the mystical center is generally
imagined as hot, as the fluid, living core of the globe. The earthly
chasm thus opens onto a different kind of imaginative space from the
astronomical void; at the bottom of the bottomless abyss is the region
not of transcendence but of immanence, the locus in which all knowledge,
all being, all power are immediately present. To attain the center of the
Earth, then, means to penetrate the heart of nature, to possess nature
absolutely. This is the object of Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew
Axel’s quest.

Extremes meet and magical opposites are always, in a sense, identical. At
the time Verne was writing Journey to the Center of the Earth, he
was also

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writing Captain Hatteras (1866), in which an obsessed
adventurer reaches the North Pole. The pole itself turns out to be an
erupting volcano—magical heat in the center of the regions of cold—and
standing on the lip of the polar crater, the margin of the space in which
heat and cold, life and death, inside and outside, immanence and
transcendence interpenetrate, Hatteras goes mad.7 Significantly, in Journey to the Center of the
Earth Lidenbrock and Axel gain access to the interior by travelling
north to the cold and barren arctic limits of the habitable world, Iceland,
where they enter the subterranean regions through the cone of the extinct
volcano Sneffels.

In travelling to Iceland Lidenbrock and Axel are following the directions
given in a runic cryptogram that the professor has discovered in an
ancient book: “Descend into the crater of Sneffels Yokul, over which the
shadow of Scartaris falls before the kalends of July, bold traveller, and
you will reach the centre of the earth. I have done this. Arne
Saknussemm” (6:32). Arne Saknussemm, Lidenbrock knows, was a 16th-century
Icelandic alchemist. The deciphering of his coded message is the novel’s
first narrative concern and this initial action provides the paradigm for
the fiction as a whole, for nature itself is conceived here as a kind of
cryptogram to be decoded. The key to Saknussemm’s message is that it must
be read backwards. Likewise, in their descent Lidenbrock and Axel must in
effect read nature backwards as they pass through the strata of
successively earlier and earlier periods of natural history, eventually
finding themselves in a marvelous underground world filled with plants
from the era of the giant ferns. Here, too, they discover long extinct
animals and in one of the well-known Vernian set-pieces witness a mortal
battle between an Ichthyosaurus and a Plesiosaurus. Finally, they have a
brief glimpse of a giant prehistoric man guarding a herd of mastodons:

Immanis pecoris custos, immanior ipse... Yes, indeed, the shepherd
was bigger than his flock . . . He was over twelve feet tall. His head,
which was as big as a buffalo’s, was half hidden in the tangled growth of
his unkempt hair—a positive mane, like that of the primitive elephant. In
his hand he was brandishing an enormous bough, a crook worthy of this
antediluvian shepherd. (19:218)

This journey to the Earth’s center is thus also a journey into the abyss
of evolutionary time, and the fusion of the spatial and temporal modes is
one of the novel’s sources of power. Temporally projected, the quest for
the center, the heart of the mystery, becomes the pursuit of origins, the
quest for an ultimate moment of beginning. Understanding this fusion of
modes helps to explain why the prehistoric giant is presented in the
language of pastoral, a language which activates a literary code of
origin that is simultaneously spatial and temporal in mode, both “there”
and “then.” Understanding this also helps to explain why Lidenbrock and
Axel’s journey is presented as a repetition of Arne Saknussemm’s journey,
as a recovery of an original knowledge once possessed by science in its
primeval past. The professor and his nephew in following the mysterious
alchemist’s footsteps are in effect restoring science to its center and
origin.

The process of decoding, of learning to read nature, is in this fiction
essentially an action of naming. Like many of Verne’s protagonists—think,
for instance, of Aronnax and Conseil in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under
the Sea (1870)—Lidenbrock and Axel are obsessive categorizers
concerned to find the exact name for each geological stratum, the exact
botanical and zoological classification for each underground species of
plant or animal. As they descend they are concerned, too, with being able
to name their precise position in relation to the surface, the exact
number of vertical and lateral feet that they have travelled at each
point. Moreover, since they are penetrating an unknown

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world, Lidenbrock and Axel are obliged not only to discover but at
times to create names: the “Hansback”for the underground stream that guides
them part of their way, “Port Grauben,” “Axel Island,” “Cape Saknussemm.”
The imposition of human names on the non-human world is obviously an act of
appropriation and conquest, for to be able to decipher and read nature is
here to possess it, to drain it of its mysterious otherness and make it
part of the human world. In a characteristic moment Axel describes coming
upon a dense subterranean forest composed of weird umbrella-like trees:

I quickened my step, anxious to put a name to these strange objects. Were
they outside the 200,000 species of vegetables already known, and had
they to be accorded a special place among the lacustrian flora? No; when
we arrived under their shade, my surprise turned to admiration. I found
myself, in fact, confronted with products of the earth, but on a gigantic
scale. My uncle promptly called them by their name.

‘It’s just a forest of mushrooms,’ he said.

And he was right. It may be imagined how big these plants which love
heat and moisture had grown. I knew that the Lycopodon
giganteum, according to Bulliard, attains a circumference of eight
or nine feet, but here there were white mushrooms thirty or forty feet
high, with heads of an equal diameter. There were thousands of them;
the light could not manage to penetrate between them, and complete
darkness reigned between those domes, crowded together as closely as
the rounded roofs of an African city. (30:166 67)

Notice how this passage enacts a conquest, an annexation of
alien territory. It begins in tension with Axel unable to name the “strange
objects.” As the passage develops the objects become “just” mushrooms. Next
they are associated with the “Lycopodon giganteum”—that is, with a
scientific or exact name. Finally they are transformed metaphorically into
“the rounded roofs of an African city,” so that we are now viewing a
primitive but specifically human landscape.

Appropriately, it is Professor Lidenbrock rather than Axel who in this
passage first names the “strange objects.” From the beginning, Lidenbrock
is a figure of heroic will engaged in mortal combat with the non-human
world. Arriving at the base of Sneffels, he is described as
“gesticulating as if he were challenging” the volcano. “So that is the
giant I am going to defeat!” (13:85) he announces in a phrase that
sustains this aspect of the fiction. Nothing daunts the professor.
Obsessively, he presses forward through every difficulty that lies in the
way of the total conquest of nature. “The elements are in league against
me!” he cries at a moment when the battle becomes particularly furious:
“Air, fire, and water combine to block my way! Well, they are going to
find out just how strong-willed I am! I won’t give in, I won’t move back
in inch, and we shall see whether man or Nature will get the upper hand!”
(37:206).

The narrative establishes the professor’s significance in part by placing
him in opposition to Hans, the phlegmatic Icelandic peasant who acts as
guide. By trade an eiderdown hunter—an occupation that significantly
involves no struggle with nature since the “hunter” merely collects the
feathers from the eider’s readily accessible nest—Hans is clever and
resourceful but utterly without will. Indeed, Axel calls him “that man of
the far West endowed with the fatalistic resignation of the East”
(42:236). The principal thing that Hans cares about is his salary; he
insists upon having three rix-dollars doled out to him each Saturday
evening no matter what the exploring party’s situation or location. This
mechanical action becomes a comic leitmotif in the novel, but it also
suggests the peasant’s absolute unconcern about his surroundings, his
obliviousness to nature’s marvels. Curiously, Hans and Professor
Lidenbrock, while in most respects opposed figures, are at one point seen
as similar. Sailing across a

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magnificent underground sea, the professor expresses irritation that
they are making no progress toward the center. Axel is delighted with the
beautiful views, but Lidenbrock cuts his rapture short:

‘I don’t give a damn for views. I set myself an object, and I mean to
attain it. So don’t talk to me about magnificent views...’

I took him at his word, and left the Professor to bite his lips with
impatience. At six in the evening, Hans claimed his wages, and three
rix-dollars were counted out to him. (33:183)

Each imprisoned in his own form of obsession, Lidenbrock and
Hans are equally blind to the magic of their surroundings. Paradoxically,
the aggressive, passionately involved, Western attitude toward nature can
isolate one from nature no less effectively than the passive unconcern of
the East.

Both Hans’ passivity and Lidenbrock’s will to conquer nature are opposed
to Axel’s romanticism. In a characteristic exchange, the professor and
his nephew discuss the fact that the subterranean sea has tides like
those on the surface. Axel is amazed and delighted; his uncle, however,
finds nothing marvelous in the discovery, pointing out that a
subterranean sea will be as subject to the Sun and Moon’s gravitation as
any other.

‘You are right,’ I cried. ‘The tide is beginning to rise.’

‘Yes, Axel, and judging by the ridges of foam I estimate that the sea
will rise about ten feet.’

‘That’s wonderful!’

‘No, it’s perfectly natural.’

‘You may say what you like, Uncle, but it all seems extraordinary to
me, and I can scarcely believe my eyes. Who would ever have imagined
that inside the earth’s crust there was a real ocean, with ebbing and
flowing tides, winds and storms?’ (3l:l70-7l)

Axel and his uncle live in different mental universes, Axel
embodying the spiritualistic response to the non-human (“That’s
wonderful!”), Lidenbrock embodying bourgeois materialism (“No, it’s
perfectly natural”). Not surprisingly, each at various points in the story
believes that the other has gone mad.

Near the end of the novel, however, Axel undergoes a conversion.
Confronted with what appears to be an insurmountable obstacle to further
descent—a huge boulder has sealed the gallery through which they must
pass—the youth is suddenly seized by his uncle’s demon of heroic
conquest. Now it is Axel who is impatient with delay and who insists that
they must immediately blow up the rock with explosive gun-cotton.“The
Professor’s soul had passed straight into me, and the spirit of discovery
inspired me. I forgot the past and scorned the future” (40:226). Nothing
matters for him now except the imperative of penetration to the center.
Daemonically possessed, Axel has become like his uncle a “hero.” His
journey, then, has become an initiation into the bourgeois-heroic
attitude toward nature, a “going in” in a social as well as a physical
sense, and the story ultimately ratifies his new status as an adult male
by granting him the hand of the professor’s beautiful goddaughter,
Grauben. Nevertheless, as the comic ironies persistently directed against
Professor Lidenbrock’s limited vision suggest, in the youth’s passage
something has been lost as well as gained. Caring neither for past nor
future, imprisoned in the narrow cage of his own will to dominate, Axel
can no longer confront nature except as an antagonist, something utterly
apart from himself.

Axel and his uncle never do reach the Earth’s mysterious center. The
gun-cotton explosion triggers a volcanic eruption and, like an animal
defending itself against an intrusion into its body, nature expels the
explorers, vomits them

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out along a great volcanic shaft back into the air. Perhaps physical
achievement of the center is impossible’! Or perhaps reaching that magical
locus would mean going mad like Captain Hatteras on the crater of the polar
volcano’, In any case, the point of furthest penetration, the journey’s
true climax, is reached, significantly, not by the professor but by his
romantic nephew and not in literal reality but in a vision.

Before his conversion, Axel, reflecting upon “the wonderful hypotheses of
paleontology,” has an extended daydream in which, first, he supposes the
subterranean world filling with long extinct creatures: antediluvian
tortoises, great early mammals, Pterodactyls and other primeval birds.
“The whole of this fossil world came to life again in my imagination” As
his dream continues. however. the great animals disappear, the Earth
grows steadily warmer, and he finds himself in a still earlier age, the
period of gigantic vegetation Even here the dream does not end. Sweeping
backward into the abyss of time in quest of the center, the point of
origin, Axel finds the heat becoming more and more intense until the
Earth’s granite liquifies and finally the planet itself dissolves into
its original white-hot gaseous mass: “In the centre of his nebula, which
was fourteen hundred thousand times as large as the globe it would one
day form, I was carried through interplanetary space. My body was
volatilized in its turn and mingled like an imponderable atom with these
vast vapours tracing their flaming orbits through infinity” (33:179-80).
Climactically. Axel himself disappears. becoming part of the cosmic
infinity. At the ecstatic center, the boundary between man and nature,
the human and the non-human, melts and the explorer merges with the world
being explored.

Axel’s dream represents, of course, both a romantic alternative to the
professor’s treatment of nature as an antagonist to be conquered and a
fusion of spiritualistic and materialistic world views.8 Moreover. in Axel’s dream, the text calls attention
to its own status as a fiction. an imaginary voyage. This kind of fictive
self-consciousness was perhaps implicit in such earlier passages as
Axel’s rhetorical question, “Who could ever have imagined that inside the
earth’s crust there was a real ocean, with ebbing and flowing tides,
winds and storms?” Now. however, in the description of the fossil world
coming to life in Axel’s imagination— these events are shortly to occur
in the narrative proper as the explorers begin to encounter extinct
animals and plants—the text’s play with its own fictionality is
particularly emphatic and we can hardly miss seeing Axel as momentarily a
version of Verne.

Expelled from the interior. the explorers emerge in an eruption of Mt.
Stromboli in Sicily:

We had gone in by one volcano and come out by another. and this other was
more than three thousand miles from Sneffels. from that barren country of
Iceland at the far limits of the inhabited world! The chances of our
expedition had carried us into the heart of the most beautiful part of
the world! we had exchanged the region of perpetual snow for that of
infinite verdure. and the gray fog of the icy north for the blue skies of
Sicily! (44:249)

Like the interior, the surface is a realm of infinities. but
here the “infinity” is one of welcoming, protective vegetation. Since. in
this novel, the interior space has become the void, the exterior world
becomes the known and safe space. In reaching Sicily. Lidenbrock and Axel
have, ironically. reached the Earths center, the pimitive heart not of
nature but of the human sphere. “We were in the middle of the
Mediterranean.” says Axel. “in the heart of the Aeolian archipelago of
mythological memory, in that ancient Strongyle where Aeolus kept the winds
and storms on a chain” (44:249). Warm and nourishing in contrast

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with the icy polar verge, the Sicilian landscape is a paradise of
olives, pomegranates, and vines hung with delicious fruit, a landscape that
recalls and fulfills the brief evocation of pastoral in the subterranean
encounter with primeval man.

With the arrival in Sicily the narrative proper is over; in substituting
one code of “centrality” for another, the text has achieved narrative
closure. Nevertheless, a further detail remains to be treated in a coda.
On the shore of the subterranean sea, after a fierce electrical storm,
the explorers’ compass seemed to indicate that they had been travelling
for nearly 1500 miles in the wrong direction. Had they really been going
north when they thought they were going south? The mystery of the compass
remains an unexplained phenomenon and a torment to Professor Lidenbrock,
since “for a scientist an unexplained phenomenon is a torture for the
mind” (45:253). One day, however, back in Hamburg, Axel notices that the
compass needle points south instead of north and he realizes that the
electrical storm in the Earth’s interior must have reversed the
instrument’s poles. The final mystery is explained, the puzzle is
complete, and, in a version of the “lived-happily-ever-after” formula,
Axel tells us that “from that day onward, my uncle was the happiest of
scientists” (45:254).

This coda affirms the materialistic faith that the book of nature is
readable to the last word, that nature is merely a cryptogram to be
decoded, or, as Axel puts it, that “however great the wonders of Nature
may be, they can always be explained by physical laws” (37:208). And yet,
despite this explicit positivistic affirmation, the narrative’s romance
structure suggests a more problematic view. Here “explaining nature” is
represented by the idea of reaching the center, which of course the
explorers never do attain. Did Arne Saknussemm ever in fact reach the
center? Throughout the story, Axel and Lidenbrock debate the question of
the Earth’s internal temperature. Is the Earth’s core molten or even
gaseous with a temperature perhaps over two million degrees as Axel, the
romantic, maintains? Or, as the positivistic Lidenbrock supposes, does
the rise in temperature experienced as one descends into the Earth reach
a limit at a certain depth, leaving a core that can be explored by human
beings? So far as the explorers descend the temperature remains
comfortable, but the ultimate issue of whether the center itself is
transcendently hot is never resolved, and in the narrative this debate
becomes equivalent to the question of how nature can be known. Is the
center literally reachable, as Lidenbrock passionately believes” Or, as
Axel’s dream implies, is it in fact a magical place attainable only in
dream or in vision or in fiction?

2. Journey to the Center of the Earth can be taken as
representative of all those narratives in which the non-human is
projected as existing “out there.” Sometimes the non-human is an
inanimate object such as Wells’s intruding planet or a physical
locale—the interior of the Earth, the surface of the Moon, the farthest
reaches of the galaxy—and sometimes it is animate, an “alien” such as
Wells’s Martians. There is a logical continuity between stories of
natural exploration and stories of alien contact. Frequently explorers
will encounter animated embodiments of the alien landscape such as, say,
the deadly sunflowers in Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970).
Sometimes, too, an inanimate landscape will come alive, as in, for
example, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (1973), where a
mysteriously empty spaceship that the human protagonists are
investigating suddenly begins to produce “biological robots.” But even
when the non-human remains more or less strictly inanimate, the romance
form, which requires an antagonist, will nearly always result in some
degree of metaphorical animation, as when the Earth vomits Verne’s
explorers from its body. Understanding how narratives of natural
exploration pass by degrees into narratives of alien contact

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helps to define the logical position of such stories as Olaf
Stapledon’s StarMaker (1937), Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud
(1957), or Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund’s If the Stars are Gods
(1977), in which nebulae, stars, and other features of the cosmic landscape
turn out to be alive and sentient. The possibility of a class of stories
such as these, a class that might be said to be located exactly midway
between fictions of inanimate nature such as Journey to the Center of
the Earth and alien-contact fictions such as The War of the
Worlds (1898), is implicit in the structure of the genre.

The narrative activity in fictions conceived primarily in the spatial
category will generally be one of two kinds. Sometimes, as in Journey
to the Center of the Earth, man penetrates the non-human sphere, but
equally often, as in “The Star,” it is the non-human that is the active
force, thrusting itself disruptively into the human sphere. Whether
humanity is presented as active or as passive is obviously important in
shaping the fiction’s view of man’s position in the world—Verne
characteristically conceives man as heroic and active, Wells as
vulnerable and passive—but, whatever the conceptual content, the general
area of fictional concern remains the same. Moreover, underlying nearly
all SF in which the non-human is projected spatially, we normally find
some version of the Pascalian vertigo, either the terror of the void or
exaltation in the contemplation of the freedom of infinite space.

The War of the Worlds, which is the best known and most
influential of all alien-contact stories, is a Darwinian fable, depicting
an interplanetary struggle for survival. Wells chooses as his narrator a
philosophical writer who is at work on a series of papers prophesying the
development of moral ideas as civilization progresses. The Martian
invasion interrupts the narrator’s work in mid-sentence, evidently just
as he was about to sketch an advanced and humane future; instead of a
version of utopia, the narrator is compelled to portray the collapse of
society and the reduction of men to anonymous creatures, scrabbling like
animals to remain alive. Wells’s theme here, as in The Time
Machine and many of his early stories, is the terrible fragility of
civilization, of all that we consider humane, when seen in the larger
context of such brutal natural forces as the evolutionary process.

The Pascalian terror of the void, however, is no less important in The
War of the Worlds than is the idea of evolution. Observing Mars
through a telescope, Wells’s narrator describes the planet as a tiny warm
light:

It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly
marked with transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect
round. But so little it was, so silvery warm—a pin’s head of light! It
was as if it quivered, but really this was the telescope vibrating with
the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view.9

The narrator goes on to remind us of “the immensity of vacancy
in which the dust of the material universe swims” and to invoke the
“unfathomable darkness” of space: “You know how that blackness looks on a
frosty starlight night. In a telescope it seems far profounder” (I: 1:312).
The contrast drawn here between light and darkness, warmth and cold,
quivering movement and vacancy, is ultimately a contrast between life and
death: the “unfathomable darkness” of space is also the mystery of
non-being, and the passage as a whole suggests the preciousness and the
fragility of life in a universe that is mostly empty.

Life and death are the terms in conflict in The War of the Worlds.
Despite its vital appearance in the telescope, Mars is a dying planet.
Older than the Earth, its oceans are evaporating, its atmosphere is
dissipating, and the entire planet is cooling, moving towards the chill
of death. Observing the Earth, the Martians see a planet teeming with
life, a “warmer planet, green with vegetation

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and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility”
(I:1:310). To preserve themselves they undertake to invade Earth.

From one point of view, Mars and the Martians are a precious speck of
life in the universe. From another, however, they are the agents of
death. The novel opens with a description of the Martians studying
mankind from across the gulf of space even as a man with a microscope
might study the miniscule creatures in a drop of water. “With infinite
complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little
affairs,” while millions of miles away on Mars, “minds that are to our
minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and
cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly
and surely drew their plans against us” (I:1:309). The contrast between
the greatness of the Martian intelligence and the littleness of mankind
that dominates the novel’s opening recalls the familiar contrast between
the greatness of the cosmos and human littleness. Indeed, what Wells has
done is to transfer the usual attributes of the physical cosmos—vastness,
coldness, indifference—to the Martians. Significantly, the Martians in
their fighting machines dwarf men physically, even as their great brains
dwarf ours intellectually. Their weapons—the heat ray, the poison gas—are
depersonalizing instruments of mass slaughter, and attempts to
communicate with them are as fruitless as if they were literally a force
of nature. The Martians have consciousness and will, but they are not
unlike the intruding planetoid in “The Star” in their absolute unconcern
for mankind.

Wells’s Martians thus fuse the Darwinian and the Pascalian themes, and
the conception of the black void of space informs the whole narrative.
Much of the fable’s power, however, derives from the richness with which
Wells develops the Martians as fairy-tale-like figures of death.
Physically feeble as a result both of their extreme evolution and the
unaccustomed gravity of Earth, the Martians move painfully and slowly
like dying creatures. Only their eyes. the signs of their intelligence.
are intense and vital. Their strength comes from their elaborate
machines, mechanisms which are. like themselves, grotesque images of life
in death. At one point the narrator describes these machines in detail,
emphasizing the way in which they seem more alive than their masters:

It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most
cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of disks in an elastic
sheath: these disks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully
together when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the
curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and
disturbing to the human beholder. was attained. Such quasi-muscles
abounded in the crab-like handling-machine which. on my first peeping out
of the slit. I watched unpacking the cylinder. It seemed infinitely more
alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it in the sunset light.
panting. stirring ineffectual tentacles. and moving feebly after their
vast journey across space. (11:2:412)

But not only are the Martians and their machines figures of
living death; the Martians are also vampires, maintaining their feeble
existence by draining other creatures’ blood. Moreover, the color red with
which they are repeatedly associated—Mars is of course the red planet, the
Martian vegetation that takes hold on the Earth is red’ end the heat ray
turns everything it touches lurid red with flame—hints of the diabolic.
Metaphorically, the Martians are fiends. and such passages as the
description of the alien outpost lit by the “vivid red glare” of flames
against which the Martians appear in silhouette as huge black shapes.
grotesque and strange (1:11:345) suggest the way they transform the English
countryside into the landscape of hell.

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The diabolic red—often the color is “blood red”—is related to the
evolutionary theme, suggesting the bloody competition in which one
species is another’s food. Through the heat ray and its fires, the color
is also associated with the pattern of references to temperature—both
extremes of temperature are deadly: the Earth is neither hot nor cold but
benevolently warm—and thus with the cosmic theme, reminding us of the
narrow range of conditions in which life is possible. In the novel’s
striking color pattern, red is opposed both to black, the color of the
void and of death, and to green and grey or blue, the colors of the
living Earth and by extension of life generally.10 Appropriately, given the characterization of the
Martian machines as a form of sham life, the falling cylinders appear in
the sky as greenish streaks and the digging and refining machines produce
flickering green fire and puffs of green smoke.

The narrative of the Martian invasion, the story of the apparently
inevitable triumph of death over life, reaches a climax in the chapter
titled “Dead London,” in which the narrator, having survived his
imprisonment in the ruined house and met and parted from the
artilleryman, arrives in a desolate urban landscape of black dust and
corpses, a “city of the dead” lying in “its black shroud” (II:8:441). In
South Kensington he hears the sound of a Martian howling, “Ulla, ulla,
ulla, ulla,” and soon discovers that the invaders have succumbed to
earthly bacteria, antagonists for which they were wholly unprepared. The
Martians’ sudden overthrow is anticipated by a number of earlier
references to bacteria, but above all we are reminded of the novel’s
opening and the image there of the Martians studying us from a distance
“as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that
swarm and multiply in a drop of water” (I:1:309). The teeming microbes,
flashing through their minimal existences, signify the ultimate units of
life; in effect they stand for the vital principle itself.11 By employing them to defeat the Martians the text
not only emphasizes human insignificance but also reaffirms that all
along it has been concerned with an opposition broader and more
encompassing than the particular struggle between the Martians and
ourselves. Related to this reaffirmation of the broader concerns is the
shift in the perception of the invaders that occurs when the narrator
hears the “sobbing alternation” of the dying Martian’s cry. “It was,” he
says, “as if that mighty desert of houses had found a voice for its fear
and solitude” (II:8:441). When the cry ceases the narrator states
directly that the wailing represented a kind of companionship: “By virtue
of it London had still seemed alive, and the sense of life about me had
upheld me” (II:8:443). What Wells has done, as a recent commentator
shrewdly notes, is to transpose the developing tragedy of the human race
into a tragedy of the Martians.12 The
transposition is both aesthetically satisfying—closure is achieved
through the surprising fulfillment of our expectations of tragedy—and
significant. Once again, as at the opening, the Martians are aligned with
life rather than death, are seen as precious fragments of sentience in a
universe of hostile vacancy.

The ending thus hints at a kind of tragic fraternity between men and
Martians. Nevertheless, the text suggests that we must be cautious about
how completely we share the narrator’s moment of identification with the
aliens. The narrator hears the final howl as a kind of sobbing and he
speaks of the Martian dying “even as it had been crying to its
companions” (11:8:445). But earlier we have been told that the Martians
are probably telepathic and that their sounds are in no way connected
with communication. Moreover, the repeated characterization of the
Martians as emotionless figures of cold intellect should make us realize
that here the narrator is projecting his own feelings onto the aliens,
attributing human characteristics to creatures fundamentally different
from ourselves. After the death of the Martians, the narrator also lapses
into what is

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for him an unusual rush of religious emotion, evoking God’s wisdom
and the story of Jehovah’s decimation of King Sennacherib’s army in order
to protect the chosen people, and finally extending his hands to the sky in
gratitude to the Lord. Oddly, at this moment the narrator sounds almost
like the provincial curate whose inability to transcend his inappropriate
religious conceptions results in madness. All through the novel Wells has
been concerned with the difficulty of achieving and sustaining an adequate
conception of the Martians and of the threat that they pose. The curate is
the most obvious example of Wells’s concern with this issue, but the
artilleryman, too, as the novel gradually reveals, is as much driven by
self-aggrandizing fantasies and by petty class resentments—“There won’t be
any more Royal Academy of Arts, and no nice little feeds at restaurants”
(II:7:432)—as by a genuine grasp of the situation, and, despite his fine
talk, he finally lapses into self-indulgence and inaction. We are all, the
novel suggests, limited in our understanding of things by the pettiness of
our lives, and we all find it difficult to come to grips with a truly
indifferent universe, one neither arranged on a human model nor constructed
on a human scale.

The Martians are by far the most interesting figures in Wells’s novel,
and the conception of them is central to the fiction in a way that the
particular conception of the narrator of the artilleryman is not. At one
level the Martians are signs that stand for the idea of alienness, the
idea of the incomprehensible otherness of the universe in which man
lives. At another level, however, they stand for ourselves. In the
evolutionary fable, for example, the Martians with their hypertrophied
brains and atrophied bodies suggest a possible human future. Alluding to
Wells’s own popular essay on future evolution, “The Man of the Year
Million” (1893), the narrator mentions that, long before the Martian
invasion, a quasi-scientific writer suggested that man might evolve into
just such creatures as the Martians. The narrator goes on to remark that
“without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish
intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being”
(II:2:410), and thus he makes explicit another dimension of metaphorical
significance, this time a specifically moral one in which the Martians
represent the eternal danger of cold reason divorced from humane feeling.

The Martians also have political significance and once again the narrator
makes this dimension explicit, comparing the Martian colonization of the
Earth to the European extermination of the Tasmanians. We can perhaps
read an even more fundamental, though less explicit, political meaning in
the fiction if we consider the Martians as a metaphorical projection of
the capitalistic industrial system of the late 19th century, here
conceived as a social machine created by a ruthless economic reason that
sucks the lifeblood out of human beings. Such a reading would emphasize
the Martians’ inaccessibility, their failure to respond to human attempts
at communication, and their reduction of mankind to degraded and
anonymous masses. It would find new and ironic meaning in the image of
the machines as seemingly more alive than the actual Martians. And it
would emphasize, too, the artilleryman’s description of the petty clerks,
fearful of being dismissed from jobs in businesses they did not
understand, fearful of their wives and of criminals in the back streets,
concerned principally with securing a little bit of money to make for
safety in “their one little miserable skeddadle through the world”
(II:7:433). Such already dead souls, the artilleryman suggests, would be
delighted to be the Martians’ cattle: after a while they would even
wonder how people survived before there were Martians to take care of
them.

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3. Wells’s Martians raise fundamental questions about the
portrayal of aliens— and, indeed, of the non-human generally—in
literature. Is it possible to avoid projecting human characteristics onto
the alien? Is it possible, in other words, to portray a truly alien
creature, one wholly different from ourselves?

If alien creatures are ever encountered, the problem of how to comprehend
them will be a matter for science. Fiction, however, is not an instrument
of inquiry of the same order as physics or biology. The question here is
not one of knowledge—can we know the non-human?—but one of
representation. As Patrick Parrinder suggests, it is not possible to
imagine something utterly alien but only to conceive of something as
alien by contrast or analogy with something already known. Thus we may
imagine flying pigs or ambulatory brains or even intelligent stars, but
we cannot imagine something that bears no relationship at all to what we
already know. Since the literary alien must always be constructed on some
principle of analogy or contrast with our worlds, it follows that the
truly alien can never be actualized in a text. The alien can be gestured
towards—the, text can provide signs that represent the idea of
alienness—but the alien itself in its radical otherness cannot be
directly portrayed. Moreover, the choice of alien features is always
significant. Through his aliens, an SF writer is inevitably, at least in
part, writing about his own world, and it is precisely this that makes
the aliens in SF fascinating. As Parrinder indicates, and as the case of
Wells’s Martians affirms, aliens in SF always possess a metaphorical
dimension.13

Perhaps we can regard the problem faced by the SF writer attempting to
write about the non-human as analogous to that of the religious writer
attempting to portray the divine. Like those medieval playwrights who
bring even God the Father on stage in the person of an actor, the SF
writer may choose to suppress the fact that his aliens are projections of
the human world. Alternatively, the writer may in some fashion acknowlege
the inevitable limitation inherent in the literary form, as Milton does
in Paradise Lost when he describes the struggle between God and
Satan as an epic battle.

H.G. Wells’s self-conscious gesture toward his own “The Man of the Year
Million” implicitly acknowledges the metaphorical nature of his Martians;
indeed, it is because Wells allows the metaphorical dimensions of his
aliens to develop freely that The War of the Worlds is so rich a
fiction. Other texts acknowledge and thus, in a sense, free themselves
from their limitations through humor. In Robert Sheckley’s fine
“Specialist” (1953), for instance, the aliens who land on Earth
constitute an organic starship that functions through a collaboration of
representatives of many species, each of which has a specialized role
such as Engine, Thinker, Feeder, or Eye. The starship’s immediate purpose
is to enlist a human being to fill the role of Pusher, the agent that
accelerates the vessel to faster-than-light speeds. “Pushing,” it turns
out, is mankind’s true vocation, the one for which we are biologically
specialized, and all human unhappiness and aggression derive ultimately
from our frustration at not being able to perform our proper function in
the cosmic society of specialized races. Sheckley employs the point of
view of the aliens, presenting them and their adventures in a broad
parody of a deep-sea yarn. Thus Feeder is a “youngster” on his first
voyage and the Walls are described as “fine workers and good shipmates,
but happy-go-lucky fellows at best.”14 This
conspicuous and comic anthropomorphizing enables Sheckley to avoid the
pitfalls of any solemn attempt at a direct portrayal of the alien and
insures that the text will be read as a parable rather than as a jejune
description of the true nature of the universe. From Edgar Rice Burroughs
to Larry Niven, however, the majority of popular SF writers have
pretended to present “genuine” portrayals of the alien. This is not
necessarily to say that all such fictions are ineffective. Some of
them—Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet

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Masters (1951), for example—have an authentic, if primitive,
power that derives in part precisely from the suppression of fairly obvious
connections with our world. But, compared to The War of the Worlds
or to “Specialist,” such fictions generally seem somewhat naive.

The characteristic treatment of the alien in secondary SF—that is, the
body of writing that can take the existence of the SF genre for
granted—is not particularly self-conscious. In fact, most of these texts
are less self-conscious than Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which
confirms that literary sophistication, as such, is not simply a function
of the process of generic development. The “secondariness” of these texts
characteristically manifests itself in their reaction against the pulp
stereotype of the hostile alien, a stereotype that of course derives
ultimately from Wells’s Martians. Thus we get fictions such as Arthur C.
Clarke’s interesting Childhood’s End (1953), in which the aliens
are beneficent even though they look like devils, and a whole host of
lesser fables in which salvation comes to mankind in the form of aliens
from outer space. Other stories react against the primitive SF monsters
by portraying aliens that are neither “good” nor “bad” but conspicuously
like ourselves. The best known of these is Murray Leinster’s “First
Contact” (1945), in which human and alien starships meeting in deep space
consider the problem of how each is to return home without revealing the
location of its home planet to a potential enemy. The solution is to
exchange ships, with each crew making sure that its own ship has no
capacity to trace the other. The story reaffirms its basic point about
the aliens when it concludes with the human communications officer
revealing that he spent the time while the ships were being prepared for
exchange in conversation with his alien counterpart swapping dirty jokes.

The logic of generic development leads to interiorization and to emphatic
metaphorization in which spiritual or psychological correlatives replace
simple external action. Ursula K. Le Guin’s rightly celebrated The
Left Hand of Darkness (1969) is just such a “late” treatment of the
alien-contact theme. Here the theme becomes quite explicitly a metaphor
for any contact between people of different cultures or of different
sexes or, indeed, for any kind of human contact at all. In fact, Le
Guin’s aliens, the “Gethenians,” are not true aliens at all, but only an
exotic branch of the human race. However, even as the alien contact theme
in the foreground is humanized and made figurative, the literally
non-human reappears in the background, de-animated and displaced onto the
setting, the inhospitably frigid planet Gethen or Winter, which
represents a version of the same cold and uncaring universe that Wells
animated in the form of his Martians. What Le Guin has done, in effect,
is to shift the focus of the story that Wells presents in both “The Star”
and The War of the Worlds from the non-human to the human. But the
general area of concern remains the same, and, in Le Guin as in Wells,
the importance of human brotherhood when seen against the background of
the void is self-evident.

4. The most radical “late” treatment of the alien-contact
theme—and for my purposes, the most interesting—is Stanislaw Lem’s
Solaris (1961). Like Le Guin, Lem shifts the focus from the
non-human to the human. He does so, however, not so much by making the
whole situation of contact metaphorical as by forming his narrative
precisely around the problem of anthropomorphization, the problem of
coming to grips with or even conceiving something truly nonhuman. In
Lem’s hands, cosmology, the traditional concern of SF in the space
category, yields to epistemology, an exploration of the limitations
inherent in any human frame of reference. His strategy is to turn the SF
genre with its

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usually unexamined romantic-heroic and religious structures back upon
itself. The result is a highly self-conscious fiction that is as much a
work of generic criticism—in the sense that, say, As You Like It or
Hamlet are metadramatic works of generic criticism—as it is a new
text in the genre.

Most SF narratives follow Wells in employing as their signs of the
nonhuman figures that are clearly recognizable as versions of ourselves.
Lem’s initial move in Solaris is to choose as problematic a sign
of the non-human as possible. Thus the mysterious ocean that dominates
the novel is a figure precisely located on the border between inanimate
nature and animate creature. On the one hand, the ocean is an unusual
extra-terrestrial landscape, a colloidal sea covering an entire planet.
But, on the other, it appears able to manipulate such fundamental
physical properties as gravity and to respond to stimuli in remarkable
ways. Does the ocean think? Does it have desires or emotions? Is it, in
other words, merely an extraordinary natural phenomenon or a living
creature?

By making Solaris itself unyieldingly problematic, Lem shifts the
narrative emphasis from the object to the process of inquiry. For nearly
a century the ocean has been the subject of intensive study, and an
entirely new field of knowledge, Solaristics, has developed in the
attempt to answer fundamental questions about the planet. But, although a
massive library of scholarship has been generated, little if any real
progress has been made. Large sections of the novel consist of detailed
and often funny accounts of the various theories that have been proposed
about the planet. Do the huge and fantastic forms that the ocean
continually generates—Giese, an early student of Solaris, gave these
formations such names as “mimoids,” “symmetriads,” and “asymmetriads”—
represent the physical basis of unimaginably advanced and complex
thought? Or are they the anarchic death throes of a dying creature? Has
the ocean failed to respond to human overtures because it is serenely
contemptuous of mankind? Or, being such a gargantuan creature, has it
simply failed to notice men at all?

As the novel proceeds, the inquiry turns more and more emphatically into
an analysis of the human motives behind the whole Solarist enterprise,
and thus, implicitly, also into an analysis of SF and its analogous
concern with the non-human. “We think of ourselves as the Knights of the
Holy Contact,” says Snow, one of the scientists stationed on the planet.
But such heroic notions are inappropriate, for mankind actually has no
interest in the non-human: “We are only seeking Man. We have no need of
other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other
worlds.”15 And late in the novel we hear
about the scholar Muntius, who regards the Solarist enterprise as “the
space era’s equivalent of religion: faith disguised as science.” After
all, what kind of contact could there be with anything so alien as the
ocean? According to Muntius, “Solaristics is a revival of long-vanished
myths, the expression of mystical nostalgias which men are unwilling to
confess openly. The cornerstone is deeply entrenched in the foundations
of the edifice: it is the hope of Redemption” (11:180).

Lem attempts to keep his sign of the non-human as empty, as
nonreferential, as possible, and thus he prevents the metaphorical
dimensions of his alien from developing freely in the manner of Wells.
Nevertheless, because he must employ some sign, must portray the
non-human as “this” rather than “that,” not even Lem can entirely avoid
metaphor. In selecting the sea as a sign, Lem employs a familiar image of
the non-human, one already invested by ancient usage from Homer and
Shakespeare to Melville and Verne with the idea of the infinite.
Moreover, instead of suppressing the sea’s traditional attributes of
mysteriousness and vastness, Lem insists upon them repeatedly, as, for
example, when we are told that, precisely because of its unimaginably
vast complexity, the pattern of a symmetriad is incomprehensible:

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We observe a fraction of the process, like hearing the vibration of a
single string in an orchestra of supergiants. We know, but cannot grasp,
that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination,
thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work.
(8:129 30)

Like the abysses in Journey to the Center of the Earth
or the Martians in The War of the Worlds, the enigmatic Solaris
ocean can be understood as a version of the infinite void, a metaphor for
the vast and unknown universe.

Interestingly, Lem’s protagonist, Kris Kelvin, twice has dreams
reminiscent of Axel’s crucial daydream in which, sweeping backward into
the abyss of time, he finally loses himself in infinity. Axel’s dream is
an esctatic vision. Kelvin’s dreams, however, are nightmares, brutal
embodiments of the Pascalian terror and the basic fear of the
disintegration of the self which that terror reflects:

I seemed to be growing smaller, and the invisible sky, horizonless, the
formless immensity of space, without clouds, without stars, receded,
extended and grew bigger all round me. I tried to crawl out of bed, but
there was no bed; beneath the cover of darkness there was a void. I
pressed my hands to my face. I no longer had any fingers or any hands. I
wanted to scream. . . (7.99)

The later dream, part of a series of powerful visions that
Kelvin suspects may have been directly influenced by the ocean, is more
complex. Presented in terms that distantly echo Genesis, it incorporates a
vision first of the creation of a self out of formless substance in “the
heart of vastness,” then of the making of a companion for the self, and
finally of a dissolution back into the void during which the consciousness
remains horrifyingly intact, howling soundlessly, “begging for death and
for an end” (12:186-88).

Understanding the Pascalian terror that informs the narrative helps to
explain the various protective enclosures, similar in significance to the
closed and safe spaces characteristic of Verne’s fictions, that are so
prominent in Solaris. The novel begins, for example, with Kelvin’s
being sealed first in the pneumatic envelope of a space suit and then in
a small metal capsule for the faster-than-light journey through “the pale
reddish glow of infinity” to Solaris ( 1:8). The goal of his journey is
another enclosure, the Solaris station, hovering safely, like Swift’s
Laputa, above the ocean’s surface. And the station itself is a nest of
further enclosures—cabins, laboratory, cold storage chamber—each a
special and bounded territory marked by a door, often a locked door. Many
of the chambers have windows through which at times the mysterious ocean
can be viewed. As in Verne, the window upon the infinite defines
insideness and enclosure by opposition; but here windows, lights,
spectacles, and other instruments related to seeing also suggest the
novel’s epistemological concern: how can we truly “see” the non-human?
Whenever the brighter of Solaris’s two suns rises the men must don dark
glasses until automatic metal shutters seal the windows closed. Moreover,
located in the heart of the station, the library that is the repository
of accumulated Solarist scholarship is significantly windowless. As the
image of the library suggests, intellectual structures also can be a form
of enclosure, and the huge monument of scholarly effort encapsulated in
the station’s center clearly functions as much to separate mankind from
the ocean as to open a window onto its mystery.

In Verne the feeling of enclosure is enjoyable. To sit in the coziness of
the Nautilus’s saloon and gaze out into the mystery of the ocean
is a sign of the triumph of human endeavor and a delight. In
Solaris, however, where there is little sense of joy, the complex
of protective barriers and enclosures seems rather to be an expression of
agoraphobia, the fear of open places. Not until the

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novel’s end, when Kelvin steps onto the surface of the old mimoid, do
any of the men venture out of the station. Usually, in fact, they do not
even venture out of their chambers, each remaining imprisoned in a private
psychological drama. Enclosures may protect man from the infinite; but they
also effectively sequester him in the limited world of the human, or, in
the case of more personal enclosures, in the still more limited world of
the self. As the narrative continues, the intellectual, psychological, and
physical enclosures in which the men live come to seem more and more
oppressive, and the feeling conveyed by the novel as a whole becomes
emphatically claustrophobic.

Solaris has two distinct components, the material concerned with
Solaristics the long history of attempts to understand and contact the
ocean, and the more particular story of Kelvin’s relations with Rheya,
his dead wife. The material concerned with Solaristics is broad in sweep
and coolly intellectual in style. This aspect of the novel might be
characterized as a philosophical fantasia on the central S-F theme. The
story of Kelvin and Rheya—or, rather, of the simulacrum of Rheya, a
“visitor” that the ocean generates from Kelvin’s memories—is intense and
emotional. Logically, the broader story of the attempt to make contact
with the ocean constitutes the novel’s main plot and the story of Kelvin
and Rheya constitutes the subplot, but Lem makes the broader story the
background for the story of the visitors. The Solaristics material is
rooted in satire: it recalls, for example. certain parts of A Tale of
a Tub (1704). The novel’s foreground. however, is an S-F version of a
ghost story, and it is the source of most of the book’s narrative power.

The Rheya plot is tied to the broader story of Solaris by having the
ocean produce her and the other visitors in response to the latest
attempt to achieve contact, this time by bombarding the sea with x-rays.
(What the ocean’s purposes might be in sending the visitors naturally
remains a mystery.) More important, the story of Rheya is a systematic
development from the novel’s broader concern with the human in relation
to the non-human, for the crucial point about Rheya and the other
visitors is that they are neither human nor non-human. In appearance the
visitors seem human, and, indeed, down to the level of the molecule their
bodies are indistinguishable from human bodies. Nevertheless, they are
composed of a fundamentally different kind of matter from ourselves,
conglomerations of neutrinos rather than atoms. They require neither food
nor sleep, their tissues almost instantaneously regenerate if they are
injured, and under some circumstances they possess astonishing physical
strength. Most disturbing, however, they are neither monsters nor
puppets, but fully conscious creatures capable of free will who have at
first no idea that they are anything but the human beings they resemble.
What Lem has done in introducing the visitors is to allow the human
versus non-human opposition to generate a third term on the
boundary between the two categories. And by introducing this third term
he has rendered problematic the fundamental opposition that enables his
fiction—and the SF genre in general—to exist.

Faced with the utterly alien ocean, an object neither clearly animate nor
clearly inanimate, human categories of thought break down. Giese, the
first great student of Solaris. was a scholarly classifier. But, although
he tried to remain scrupulously objective in his descriptions, Giese’s
taxonomy of Solarian forms was, as Kelvin remarks, inevitably shot
through with geocentric thinking, with inappropriate extensions of the
familiar world. Likewise, faced with the visitors, the men stationed on
Solaris must confront an impossible problem in definition and
classification. one hopelessly complicated by the fact that the visitors
are erotic figures drawn from the deepest realms of the scientists’
emotional beings. In Kelvin’s case, Rheya, who committed suicide when
Kelvin

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abandoned her, is a figure of intense guilt as well as love. Dealing
with the visitors is thus always an emotional matter, and, since the
visitors are conscious beings who regard themselves as human, the question
of how to deal with them is also always a problem with a moral dimension.

When Kelvin arrives on Solaris the visitors have already been appearing
for some time. One of the men on the station, Gibarian, has committed
suicide, and the other two, Snow and Sartorius, have retreated in various
ways into isolation. Suggestively, Gibarian’s body has been stored in a
freezer. As we have seen both in Journey to the Center of the
Earth and in The War of the Worlds temperature is often
significant in SF. Patterns of heat and cold generally refer in some way
to the modern, alienated sense of the narrow range of physical conditions
in which human life is possible and thus to the cosmic theme of the
indifferent universe. In Solaris, however, the temperature motif
has become metaphorical. Kelvin, whose name evokes the Kelvin scale for
measuring temperature, repeatedly complains that the station is stifling;
but evidently the problem is not simply physical, for here the feeling of
oppressive heat and the associated appearances of Solaris’s glowing red
sun correspond to increases in the temperature of the novel’s emotional
climate. Nevertheless, life and death are still very much the issue, and
the body in the freezer implies that Gibarian chose the cold of death
rather than continuing to try to bear the heat of a situation beyond the
range of human endurance. Snow is also in a sense dead, having lapsed
into cynicism and slovenly inactivity. Sartorius, on the other hand, like
the man who dresses for dinner in the heat of the jungle, responds to
extreme situations by clinging rigidly to normality, attempting to
eliminate anything that intrudes upon his orderly world. Formal and
pedantic, he refuses to acknowledge any personal or emotional involvement
with the visitors—indeed, he refuses to acknowledge the whole personal
side of life—and he is energetically at work upon a device to destroy
them.

Gibarian, Snow, and Sartorius represent an anatomy of manifestly
inadequate responses to the visitors. What would an adequate response be?
When Rheya appears, Kelvin initially reacts somewhat in the manner of
Sartorius, insistently reminding himself that this is not the real Rheya
and finally trapping the visitor aboard a space capsule and launching it
into orbit. If eliminated, new versions of the visitors return as if
nothing had happened, and when a duplicate Rheya appears, Kelvin, now
behaving somewhat like Snow, cynically welcomes her as his wife. But what
begins as a charade becomes reality as Kelvin falls in love with Rheya
all over again, accepting her as if she were indeed a human being and his
wife. Eventually Rheya discovers what she is. Horrified by the knowledge
but even more appalled at the pain her presence is causing Kelvin, she
attempts to commit suicide. Lem has thus driven the story into an
excruciating moral and philosophical paradox. Rheya is not human; she is
an emanation of the ocean and her presence is indeed torture to Kelvin.
Nevertheless, she truly loves him and means to kill herself for his sake.
Can such love be anything but human?

Kelvin allowed the real Rheya to kill herself; this time he does
everything he can to keep Rheya from self-destruction. But is his heroic
love appropriate? Is he not, as Snow in an important conversation
maintains, naive in believing that he will be a traitor if he lets Rheya
destroy herself and a good man if he keeps her? Is he not projecting
moral categories into a context in which human morality does not apply,
falling prey to the same kind of error that has impeded Giese and the
other Solarists in their study of the ocean? “What if it is not possible,
here, to be anything but a traitor?” Snow asks. Kelvin protests that he
loves Rheya, this Rheya who has proved her love by trying to kill
herself. “She is

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willing to give her life,” Snow replies coldly. “So are you. It’s
touching, it’s magnificent, anything you like, but it’s out of place
here—it’s the wrong setting” (10:161-62). Snow, the cool cynic, is an
unsympathetic figure compared to Kelvin, the romantic lover. Yet we should
realize that Lem has employed the sentimental codes of the literary love
story and thus encouraged us to sympathize with Kelvin’s passion only to
lead us into a trap that illustrates how difficult it is to avoid
inappropriate patterns of thought. Snow is correct. In embracing Rheya as
completely human, Kelvin has adopted a position no more adequate than that
of Sartorius, who merely wishes to obliterate the visitors.

Eventually Rheya does destroy herself. Kelvin is grief-stricken, but out
of his grief emerges a new understanding of the fallacy of his former
romanticism. Like mankind in general in its romantic and heroic attitude
toward the cosmos— appropriately, the spaceships in Solaris bear
such names as Prometheus or Ulysses—so Kelvin has regarded
himself as a figure in a heroic story. With unreflective Quixotism,
mankind has characteristically pursued such visionary goals as that of
the conquest of nature through the triumphant expansion of the human race
throughout space or, in the case of Solaris, of achieving some form of
ultimate “contact” with the ocean. Moreover, these goals have carried the
force of the absolute, of divine commands, requiring if necessary total
immolation in their pursuit. Kelvin, too, has been a Knight of the Holy
Contact, and likewise, partially in expiation of his former lack of
chivalry toward her, Rheya’s own true champion and protector. But now,
meditating upon his future without Rheya, Kelvin realizes that, although
he will develop new interests and occupations, he will not give himself
completely to them. Indeed, he discovers that he will never again give
himself completely to anything or anybody. “And this future Kelvin,” he
insists, “will be no less worthy a man than the Kelvin of the past, who
was prepared for anything in the name of an ambitious enterprise called
Contact” (14:203).

Having renounced romantic absolutes in his own life, Kelvin attempts to
extend the implications of his new understanding into the realm of
cosmology, or, more accurately, into theology. A universe in which
absolute goals make sense must contain a god to authenticate those goals,
and mankind has indeed behaved as if such an absolute god exists. But
what kind of universe can ratify his new understanding of the contingency
of all commitments? As an answer, Kelvin develops and explains to Snow
his hypothesis of an imperfect god, a limited and evolving god who
develops in the course of time. “Man does not create gods, in spite of
appearances,” Kelvin says: “The times, the age, impose them on him”
(14:205)—by which he means that the idea of a particular kind of god is
not derived from an uncircumscribed act of wish-fulfillment, but is the
product of an age’s understanding of things. Given his disillusionment,
his renunciation of romantic absolutes, the only kind of god that Kelvin
can even imagine believing in is one that is limited in omniscience and
power, “a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing,
fulfills no purpose—a god who simply is” (14:206).

Kelvin’s theological conversation with Snow is to be read less as direct
religious speculation than as an indirect restatement of his new freedom
from heroic illusions. The conversation ends abruptly with the sighting
of a very old mimoid and Kelvin’s decision to venture outside the station
and explore it. “When I get back to Earth,” he explains, “I don’t want to
have to confess that I’m a Solarist who has never set foot on Solaris!”
(14:206). Kelvin’s act of going outside is of course suggestive, as is
the image of the old and already fragmenting mimoid which perhaps
reflects the disintegrating model of reality that has dominated both
mankind’s heroic age of exploration and conquest and Kelvin’s

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romantic youth. Once outside, Kelvin realizes that he is not really
interested in the mimoid; his purpose is to acquaint himself with the
ocean. Walking to the edge of the sea, he extends his gloved hand toward a
wave and experiences a phenomenon noted a century earlier: “the wave
hesitated, recoiled, enveloped my hand without touching it, so that a thin
covering of ‘air’ separated my glove inside a cavity which had been fluid a
moment previously, and now had a fleshly consistency.” When he raises his
hand the enveloping substance rises with it, forming a kind of flower.
Stretched beyond a certain limit, however, the flower trembles and falls
back into the main body of the waiting wave. Kelvin repeats the game
several times until the ocean, “as if bored with a too familiar sensation,”
ceases to respond. Then he sits down, disturbed by the phenomenon, but
feeling “somehow changed” by the “experience as I had lived it”
(14:209-10).

The game that Kelvin plays with the ocean recapitulates the transforming
experience that he has had in the novel. Delicately, the flower-like
extension that molds itself to Kelvin’s hand recalls Rheya, who also
retreated back into the wave when stretched beyond her limit. The game is
thus a retrospective image and, as such, contributes to the achievement
of narrative closure. But it also serves as a confirmation that the
non-human really exists. that beyond ourselves is something that is not
ourselves, and as a reminder of the problematic nature of any interaction
with the genuinely alien. Sitting on the “beach, sign of the boundary
between the two modes of existence, the human and the non-human. Kelvin
decides not to return to Earth after all but to remain on Solaris. The
renunciation of heroics, Lem is suggesting, need not mean the loss of
purpose. Kelvin has no idea what kind of interactions with the ocean may
occur in the future and no hope for Rheya’s return. Nevertheless. he
knows that the ocean is real and he is willing to commit himself to
whatever the future may bring. I knew nothing,” he says in his final
words, “and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was
not past” (14:211).

NOTES

See, for example, George Poulet, Studies in Human
Time. trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore, MD: 1956), p. 13
(paraphrased here). Among the classic studies dealing with the
disintegration of the “Elizabethan World Picture” are A.O. Lovejoy,
The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: 1936); Marjorie Hope
Nicholson, The Breaking of the Circle (NY:1960 [rev. ed.]); and
Alexandre Koyré. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe
(Baltimore, MD: 1957).

Quoted by Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Edge of
Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas
(Princeton, NJ: 1960). p. 26.

“Vastness.” On the Victorian crisis of faith and sense
of loneliness and alienation see Walter Houghton, The Victorian
Frame of Mind (New Haven. CT: 1957) esp. pp. 27-180: and J. Hillis
Miller, The Disappearance of God (Cambridge, MA: 1963). Miller’s
opening chapter beautifully evokes the whole situation and also
comments in passing on the inapplicability of the model of physical
change to cultural history.

“The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat,” in
Mythologies. trans. Annette Lavers (NY,1972) pp.65-67. In
England and America, Verne still tends to be dismissed as a writer of
adventure stories for boys. In France, however, he has lately been the
subject of considerable critical attention and is becoming recognized
as a major 19th-century writer. For an excellent general essay on Verne
see Michel Butor, “Le Point Supreme et l’Age d’Or: A Travers Quelques
Oeuvres de Jules Verne,” in Répertoire (Paris 1960), pp. 130-62.
Marc Angenot surveys recent French studies in two articles both titled
“Jules Verne and French Literary Criticism.” SFS 1 (1973):33-37 and SFS
3 (1976):46-49.

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Journey to the Centre of the Earth, trans.
Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1965), 7:47. Further
citations are given in parentheses in the text. English translations of
Verne being notoriously unreliable, I have checked the relevant
passages in Baldick against the original in Le Grand Jules Verne
published by the Librairie Hachette.

In supposing the pole to be marked by a volcano opening
into the Earth’s interior, Verne was employing the notions of the early
19th-century American proponent of the hollow earth theory, John Cleves
Symmes. Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in which the seas
become warm as the explorers approach the South Pole, was probably also
influenced by Symmes and was, of course, a major influence on Verne;
see The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, ed. Sidney Kaplan (NY:
Hill & Wang, 1960), pp. xii-xiv.

Seven Science Fiction Novels of H.G. Wells (NY:
Dover, n.d.),1:1:312. Further citations are given by book:chapter:page
number in parentheses in the text.

Understanding that green and blue are in a sense
synonymous in the novel’s structure of meaning perhaps helps to gloss
the often-noted inconsistency in the description of the Martian poison
gas. At 1:15:377 the narrator mentions that spectrum analysis of the
remains of the gas indicated “an unknown element giving a group of four
lines in the blue of the spectrum.” Later, at 11:10:451, the lines are
said to be in the green. One can readily see how Wells may have made
the accidental substitution of green for blue.

Samuel L. Hynes and Frank D. McConnell make a similar
point about the bacteria in “The Time Machine and The War of
the Worlds: Parable and Possibility in H.G. Wells,” in The Time
Machineand The War of the Worlds: A Critical Edition, ed.
Frank D. McConnell (NY: Oxford UP, 1977), pp. 345-66. McConnell’s
edition also reprints a number of standard discussions of Wells,
including a selection from Bernard Bergonzi’s important The Early
H.G. Wells (Manchester, UK: 1961), the study which remains the
point of departure for criticism of Wells’s SF. Valuable discussions of
Wells’s SF can also be found in H. G. Wells: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Bernard Bergonzi, Twentieth Century Views
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1976) and in H.G. Wells and Modern Science
Fiction, ed. Darko Suvin and Robert Philmus (Lewisburg, PA: 1977).

Solaris, trans. from the French by Joanna
Kilmartin and Steve Cox (NY: Berkley, 1971), 81. Further citations are
given in parentheses in the text. The Kilmartin and Cox translation, at
two removes from the original Polish, is somewhat untrustworthy, and
therefore I have tried to avoid arguments that depend upon a particular
verbal formulation. In the Polish original, the character “Rheya” is
evidently named “Harey” and “Snow” is “Snaut.” See Edward Balcerzan’s
fine “Language and Ethics in Solaris,” SFS, 2 (1975):152-56.
Among the other useful critical discussions of Lem are Darko Suvin’s
suggestive “The Open-Ended Parables of Stanislaw Lem and
Solaris.” printed as an afterword to the text in the Berkley
edition; David Ketterer’s “Solaris and the Illegitimate Suns of
Science Fiction,” in his New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic
Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (Bloomington,
IN: 1974). pp. 182-202: and Jerzy Jarzebski’s “Stanislaw Lem,
Rationalist and Visionary,” SFS 4 (1977): 110-26.